It does. At least from what I have learned. That’s one of the thorny problems that Christianity can’t solve.
Executive Jesus, You excell greatly at stirring the pot. Hope you don’t get carpul tunnel(sp?). I love it. Enjoy the debate, but rarely feel compelled to defend God. Some people may not agree, but all religion, even that based on the Bible is at least in part(a big part) man made. Subject to interpretation, adding on things, etc. It has always amazed me, the total arrogance of man coming up with all the answers to these religious questions. I am not speaking of anyone here(safety), but the many people in my lifetime that have tried to tell me that they know what God is thinking. I think it is entertaining to speculate on things; but I haven’t been authorized to speak for God or Jesus on many issues, don’t want to get busted for it later. What I am sure of is that he has a pretty comprehensive plan in mind for those who never hear about him. I’m just gonna have to trust him on that one. He was always real partial to the children too, so I think we can safely assume it would really tick him off if we started offing them for their own good. Well maybe we could get away with those little monsters who seem evil early on.
What I have read is that RIGHTEOUS nonbelievers have a shot at heaven. According to most of the Christian theory that I’ve read, Christians who study Jesus’ teachings and attempt to follow them will become more righteous. Reaching out to nonbelievers and teaching them of Jesus and his teachings will enable the nonbelievers to have a better chance to enter Heaven, if you assume that the Christian Bible and its teachings are true…
I am not a believer, I’m an atheist. However, I have listened and read to any number of believers of various religions. That DOES NOT mean that I welcome unsolicited religious instruction/proselyzation, though.
Really? How do you know that?
The point is that you DON’T know what impact they would have. ERGO, you cannot conclude that killing these children and sending them to heaven is automatically the best and wisest thing to do. An omniscient, non-temporal being could make such a decision, but not a limited, temporally bound human.
If you truly wish to defend killing them on the grounds that these children might grow up to slaughter millions of people, then I think you have a pretty weak case on your hands.
YES, I’m talking about the killing of infants with the express purpose of sending them to heaven. While the immediate effect may indeed be to ensure that they reach heaven, there could be other consequences. These include possible long-term repercussions (as I explained earlier) and secondary, indirect consequences (such as the effect that such actions would have on non-believers across the world).
The point is that it would be woefully simplistic to assume that killing an innocent would be justified merely on the grounds that this would send that person to heaven. Unfortunately, this type of thinking – evaluating immediate effects with no regard for other repercussions – has been pervasive in this thread.
Yes, righteous non-believers (or rather righteous ones who through no fault of their own have not heard of Christianity, the “noble heathen” as it were) are said to be Heaven-eligible by a majority of Christian thought.
Would it not be better then to simply encourage such people to continue to be righteous without bringing Jesus into it? Talking about Jesus puts them at a risk they would not be at otherwise. If the goal is really to save them, then proselytizing puts them in danger, does it not?
No, Christianity teaches no such thing. Whatever you have allegedly learned is wrong, and so this thorny problem of which you speak simply does not exist.
Look, there’s an easy way to settle this. Please find some authoritative Christian text – say, a cathecism, declaration of faith, or biblical commentary – which specifically teaches that every non-believer who has never heard of Christ will necessarily enter into heaven. Since you claim that this is definitely what the Christian church teaches, then that should be a fairly straightforward task, right?
Let me know when you’re ready, and we can proceed from there.
Again a good question, DTC. But again unfortunately the answer is no. The bible teaches that righteousness comes through faith in Jesus. It is not possible to leave JC out of the picture in this case. I like JThunder’s suggestion of looking up catechisms of bible commentaries for citations on what churches teach. (Personally, I go directly to the bible itself, but then I must also be prepared to be corrected when necessary.) You will find this idea of which I speak referred to as Justification by faith.
I agree with the OP in the sense that if children go straight to heaven because they are to young to be instructed about “Jesus saves”, then the most obvious thing to do is to give them their ticket to heaven right away.
(Good news for the abortionists, isn’t it… it mustn’t be all criticizing all the time, no?)
And I fully agree with DTC. For God’s sake, keep the “Jesus saves” talk out of the world if you “love your neighbour like yourself”. Nobody needs - and nobody asks - this Christian proselytizing (we don’t even speak here about the vicious tactics used by many of them… with goals that are all but the bringing of the “good news” ).
I have met one last week, when travelling to Paris by train.
Oh well… according to him I go to hell. He was at the spot praying for me that “the Holy Spirit” visits me in order to “let me know Jesus”.
I told him during one hour and a half that I know who Jesus is, that I don’t believe a man is God, that my mother was Catholic yet that I am Muslim and a very happy person in my faith and some other stuff (he didn’t listen but one has to contribute to such discussion in order to give the proselytizer the opportunity to keep the preaching going).
He told me among others that Al Qur’an came centuries after the Bible (yes, he said that as if that was an astonishing revelation to me) and that he didn’t read it, yet he knew it was rubbish.
We know now once again that we are doomed and in addition: we must expect to drop dead by some miracle of God if we don’t “accept Jesus”
On that one (I never heard this before so it is interesting stuff to reflect on) I answered him that God can let everybody drop dead anytime anywhere; no miracle needed… And that I’m not in the least afraid to drop dead either.
OK… this was good entertainment and made me (and the people travelling with me) smile a lot.
It was also good English practice because he was US’er (for the readers who claim I’m a “US hater”: he couldn’t help that so that was no problem).
But now comes the tricky question:
Why on earth did this proselytizer do that to us? We were perfectly happy Muslims, trying to live our faith -with some sins now and then but yet no big damnation-provoking things among them so far - and now we must be convinced that we go to hell.
Unless we manage by some -unwelcome- miracle to switch a button in our mind, that makes us deny what is for us the obvious truth, namely that God is One and that God has no children (let be a human son), start worshipping a carpenter and eat what is proclaimed to be his flesh and drink what is proclaimed to be his blood, we are food for Satan…
Oh thank you proselytizer for this Good and Happy Message… You would be deprived of sleep for the rest of your days for less, no?
I should have asked this person’s mail address to ask him if he is still praying for the Holy Spirit to come and switch that button in my mind… That is the least he can do… Pray day and night for the rest of his days that this happens, after all his damnation talks that made us shiver and shake of fear by the time we were at our destination.
Lucky for me we were at a high speed train… Because now and then I felt some strange urge to throw him out of a window. Not only would killing him like that make my pile of sins appearing to be nothing in comparison. … But the currence would have taken me with him and that would have given him before he died the satisfaction to see his prediction I could die so to speak at the spot to be furfilled.
So there is one living US proselytizer walking the streets of Paris this night and may God help and bless those he is bringing The Good News Of Their Damnation.
Can someone of the Christian faith explain me why those people all seem to think that they are God? Thank you.
Oh, by the way: this one said he was a prophet of God… That was also a new element for me.
Salaam. A
Y’know, there was once a time when people would exploit that belief to commit suicide without risking damnation.
First, they would find an innocent child and kill him. The child is an innocent, so he’s guaranteed heaven. Next, the killer allows himself to be captured, shrieved (–did I spell this correctly?), and executed. Since he’s been cleansed of all sin before the execution, and being executed isn’t a mortal sin like killing yourself is, he’s also guaranteed the joys of heaven.
Pretty sweet deal, eh?
This is not true. The Bible describes several people as “righteous” who had no faith in Jesus. More importantly, the assertion itself is self-evident crap. I know lots of people, including me, who are quite righteous and have no faith in Jesus. Plain observation of reality would belie this claim even if it was in the Bible.
“Justification by Faith” comes from Luther, not the Bible. It si quite easy to be a good and righteous person and still leave Jesus out of the equation. I’ve seen it done frequently. I’ve done it myself.
JThunder:
You’re arguing with a bit of a strawman here. No one has asserted Christianity teaches all individuals who have never heard of Jesus automatically go to Heaven, only the righteous ones who have never heard of Jesus.
So if you see a righteous dude who has never heard the Word, it’s best to leave him alone, is it not. He would at that moment be in a state of grace. If you tell him about Jesus you put him at risk of rejecting what is quite honestly a rather unbelivable assertion and thereby damning himself to an eternity of torture from your merciful, loving God. If you say nothing, he will surely go to heaven because he is a good person who has never heard of JC through no fault of his own. What do you do?
Well, no, actually. Luther’s theology of faith was based heavily on the Book of Romans, particularly chapter 3:
[New International Version]
Granted, Luther made justification by faith the cornerstone of his theology, unlike other theologians, but to say that it comes from him, not the Bible, is just not correct.
Luther formulated the doctrine of salvation by faith alone. He might have used this passage as a stepping stone but the passage alone does not really specify faith alone as a soteriological criterion but simply reminds the reader that the works without faith are hollow. Luther built his faith alone doctrine on this passage but it wasn’t really read that way before Luther.
Anyway, the Bible is quite contradictory as to what is required for salvation. The Hebrew Bible calls for righteousness and obedience to the law. Jesus said all you had to do was love God and love your neighbor. He also defined loving one’s neighbor as being synonomous with loving God (parable of the sheep and the goats) so really, all you have to do is love your neighbor. If Paul said something different, well then Jesus trumps Paul.
Not true. Allow me to reproduce the following exchange which I had with Urban Ranger.
See? Not only did Urban Ranger make that claim, he also claimed that it was a thorny, unsolvable problem on the part of Christianity.
So contrary to your claim, I am not attacking a strawman. Rather, I am attacking a claim which was explicitly made in this thread – without a smidgen of actual support, I might add.
I’m not sure that Urban Ranger intended to claim that the Church teaches automatic salvation for all uninitiated inviduals rather than simply overlooking your own qualification.
Regardless of that, It’s not a claim that I made and my point still stands vis-a-vis the “noble heathen.”
Well, that is exactly and explicitly what he did say.
Similarly, you stated:
in response to a cite of some of the passages stating explicitly that salvation comes by faith alone.
So, twice in a row, you have been proven wrong. In both instances, your response is to repeat the disproven position.
What is the term for the atheist equivalent of a fundamentalist creationist?
Regards,
Shodan
I said I wasn’t sure of UR’s intent. I didn’t quibble with what was literally stated.
That passage from Romans does not represent a “faith alone” statement as it was formulated by Luther. Paul was reaching out to gentiles by stating that adherence to Mosaic Law was not necessary for salvation. He is not saying that faith without works will result in salvation nor was he saying that faith alone makes on “righteous” or “justified” which were the original assertions made by J_Sum1. What I was contending with was any argument predicated on the notion that the Bible says that a person cannot be “righteous” or worthy of salvation without faith in Jesus. The Bible simply doesn’t say that.
But, isn’t the idea behind the “noble heathen” idea is that the noble heathen would have accepted Christianity had he known about it? So, it’s not that the missionaries, by coming, are making somebody who otherwise went to heaven go to hell…they come, he converts, and he goes to heaven anyway.
The idea is that the noble heathen really worships the Christian God…he’s just ignorant of that.
But the noble heathen is already saved if left alone. If he hears about Jesus he has a high liklihood of rejecting Christianity in favor of his innocently held faith in his own religion and thus damning himself.
The missionaries can best assure his salvation by leaving him alone, can they not?
No. The noble heathen is Christian in everything but name. His beliefs are such that, if he were told about Christianity, he would accept it. That’s what makes him “noble”…he’s living an ethical Christian life because his beliefs are in line with Christian teachings (he just doesn’t know it). He might not even have faith in his own religion (according to medieval Catholicism, Socrates and Aristotle, two who didn’t believe in the Greek gods, were included in the category we’re describing…the term medieval Catholicism used was “virtuous pagan”, and virtuous pagans went to Limbo, not heaven).
Some Protestant groups go even further than that, and say that no one can influence anyone else’s salvation in any way. Some Calvinist groups say this, and so does Mormonism, for example. Everyone will have a moment in his or her life (or, after death, for the LDS), where he or she will have the opportunity to accept Christianity and the Christian way of life. What he or she makes of that opportunity is up to him or her.
Considering that Urban Ranger went out of his way to proclaim that this is “one of the thorny problems that Christianity can’t solve,” I’d think it’s clear that he full intended to make that claim. After all, this problem would hardly be thorny – much less unsolvable – unless he was indeed referring to all the uninitiated.